Here's What the Age of Internet Empires Looks Like

In case there was any doubt left in anyone's mind that Google and Facebook have evolved from mere websites to global empires, here's a map illustrating their ascent to world domination.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute are out with a new visualization that shows the most visited websites per country, based on publicly available data from Alexis gathered from millions of Internet users since 1996. Basically, the map is awash in red and blue—Google's red, Facebook's blue.

"The supremacy of Google and Facebook over any other site on the web is clearly apparent," write the map's creators, Stefano De Sabbata and Dr. Mark Graham, on the institute's Information Geographies blog.

Google's empire covers Europe, North America, and Oceania. Facebook has conquered much of South and Central America, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. Asia’s the one part of the world the duopoly hasn't penetrated. China's search engine Baidu still reigns supreme throughout the region, as does Yandex in Russia. And Yahoo’s fallen empire still has a foothold in Japan and Taiwan.

A second map shows the same data but the countries are drawn according to population instead of geographic size. Viewed through that lens, it’s clear that Baidu, which dominates super-dense China and South Korea, shouldn’t be discounted.

The visual certainly drives home the kind of reach these companies have across the globe. As De Sabbata and Graham point out, for the half of the Internet population where Google isn't the number one website, it's number two.

"We are likely still in the very beginning of the Age of Internet Empires," they wrote. "But, it may well be that the territories carved out now will have important implications for which companies end up controlling how we communicate and access information for many years to come."

The whole thing's reminiscent of a game of Risk, where two players are duking it out, another's fighting to stay in the game, and only one will win. (Or for a more accurate comparison, the Age of Empires computer game, which the map was modeled after.)

Except, it's real life. Which is pretty scary to think about. If it is just the early days of the age of Internet empires, what direction will the future take us? Will empires fall, as empires are wont to do? Will one corporation (cough, Google) be left to reign supreme in the end? Or will the web live up to its promise as the harbinger of a renewed democracy?